Lack of gain using Captor

jeffandtaxes

New member
Recently bought a Two Notes Captor and I've used it with both my Blockhead Firstborn and Dr. Z Mazerati GT. I'm running into my DAW onto a track with Wall of Sound plugin.

The tone is excellent, but I'm not getting the gain that I hear with the amp plugged into an actual speaker cab. Not even close, as a matter of fact.

The Wall of Sound plugin gives you a knob to emulate speaker breakup, but this doesn't help.

In this case I'm talking about running either amp at the same volume I do when recording with a mic, where it's got a nice overdriven sound including power tube saturation at higher volumes. The speaker breakup is really not part of the picture.

Yet, at the same (or even slightly higher) volume level playing without speakers and directly into the load box, the recorded sound is significantly cleaner sounding. Hope this explanation makes sense.

The phenomenon makes no sense, and in fact, right in the documentation for the Two Notes Captor they admonish users to resist running the amp hotter than they would normally with speakers.

Both amps are non-mv. At the volume setting I'm running these amps to get the sound I want it is painfully loud. This is one reason I bought the load box, so I can record more often without worrying about neighbors. Yet at the same volume knob setting into the load box the result isn't "clean", but it's certainly significantly cleanER.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong? Or is this inherent in this setup?
 
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